We
must work for reconciliation among the peoples, between the races, between
labor and management, but we must also work for it in the undramatic situations
of our lives—in the everyday. I once witnessed an example of such reconciliation
in connection with the reading of Hasidic tales.

In the summer of 1961 I conducted
three Buber seminars for the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples at their
ranch in the Valley of the Moon north of San Francisco. As a part of one of
these seminars, the members were asked to read Buber’s Tales of the
Hasidim and select one to bring to the group, telling what it meant to them
and why they selected it. One woman read to us the tales entitled "Drudgery":

Rabbi
Levi Yitzhak discovered that the girls who knead the dough for the unleavened
bread drudged from early morning until late at night. Then he cried aloud
to the congregation gathered in the House of Prayer: "Those who hate
Israel accuse us of baking the unleavened bread with the blood of Christians..
But no, we bake them with the blood of Jews!"(1)

When she finished reading, she told us that her father, a simple man from
a poor background, used to tell her and her sisters about his childhood in
the Ukraine and about how all the children in his village were warned not
to go near the Jews’ quarter for fear of being captured and killed to
make blood for the Jewish matzoh at Passover. Her father still believed this
millenial superstition that has sprung up again and again from the fear and
hatred of the alien. The story Rabbi Levi Yitzhak struck the woman who read
it to us not because she too believed this naive yet tenacious myth but because
it removed the fear of the alien that lies as its base. It enabled her to
experience the situation from the other side—from the side of Rabbi
Levi Yitzhak, of the Jewish girls whom he befriended, and of the Jewish employers
whom he called to account!

This
"reconciliation in the everyday" is not unlike the dialogical approach
to the peace movement that Albert Camus takes in "Neither Victims Nor
Executioners":

Some of us should…take on the job of keeping alive, through the apocalyptic
historical vista that stretches before us, a modest thoughtfulness which,
without pretending to solve everything, will constantly be prepared to give
some human meaning to everyday life. (2)

(1) Buber,
Tales of the Hasidim. The Early Masters, p. 225.
(2) Buber, Tales of the Hasidim. The Early Masters, p. 244